State may give fast food workers power to bargain

For three days in April, a striking group of Jack in the Box cashiers and cooks shut down their Sacramento County store. They were calling for better schedules, more staff and for management to repair a broken ice maker.

They also called for a transformation of their industry.

Donning red T-shirts from the decade-old “Fight for $15” minimum wage campaign, the workers chanted for the passage of Assembly Bill 257.

AB 257 threatens to upend the fast food franchise business model in California. It would create a state-run council to negotiate wages, hours and working conditions for an industry that, according to federal data, employs more than 700,000 people in the state.

Under the bill, employers would be responsible for the regulations, but so would the fast food corporations that partner with franchise owners.

The measure is set to be heard in a state Senate committee next week, when organizers plan a series of coordinated strikes at fast food shops in San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland and Sacramento.

“AB 257 will force them to change — will hold them accountable,” said Adonida Briseño, 26, a Jack in the Box worker who took part in the April strike.

A potential foothold

The Service Employees International Union's push to pass AB 257 is one of the most significant organizing efforts in its “Fight for $15” campaign, a chance for a foothold into a lowwage industry where unionization has long been elusive.

California has been a proving ground for the union's efforts to advocate for low-wage workers. Los Angeles adopted a $15 minimum wage in 2015 and the state followed suit in 2016.

But franchisors and franchisees say AB 257 is unnecessary and burdensome and would raise prices for working-class customers.

“Inflation is top of mind for everybody,” said Jeff Hanscom, spokesman of the International Franchise Association, which represents corporations and franchisees. “It just doesn't make sense.”

Gene Erdman, who works at a company that owns 235 Pizza Hut franchise locations in southern California, said the council would increase costs and squeeze businesses.

“It's not the relationship with the franchisor,” said Erdman. “What makes it hard to make

money is what we're dealing with from a regulation standpoint in California.”

After narrowly passing the state Assembly in January, the bill is set to receive its first Senate hearing June 8.

Solution or overkill

Sen. Dave Cortese, a San Jose Democrat who chairs the Senate committee hearing the bill, said he supports rooting out wage theft, one of the bill's aims, but he worries that the bill's creation of a broad, regulation-setting body would be like “using a meat cleaver instead of a scalpel” on the problem.

“We just have to be careful about regimenting wages from an independent council,” he said. “In tough times, you have to be able to make course corrections.”

Sen. Josh Newman, a Brea Democrat who is on the fence, said it would be “no small thing to create a new body to oversee a whole industry.”

While the pandemic decimated indoor dining, large corporate restaurant chains fared better than neighborhood, locally-owned locales because of their size and cash holdings. Fast food restaurants, in particular, had more experience with drive-throughs, carryout and delivery options.

California has the most fast food workers in the country. In April more than 725,000 workers were employed in California's limited-service food industry, which includes fast food workers as well as those who work in fast casual establishments, pizzerias and cafes. That's higher than before the pandemic and 11% more than the same month last year.

Fast food counter workers in California made $15.61 an hour and cooks $15.35 on average, according to federal data from last May.

Few fast food stores have unionized. Organizers blame that on high employee turnover and the thousands of individual franchise owners they'd have to bargain with.

Drop in a bucket

There has been a trickle of successful Starbucks union elections this year, but those stores are owned by one corporate employer rather than franchisees. They represent a “drop in the bucket” of fast food locations, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Leticia Reyes, 55, a cook at the Sacramento County Jack in the Box, said workers like her aren't benefiting from the industry's growth. She worked through the pandemic, despite her fears about getting sick, because her husband was laid off from his hotel chef job.

“They're making millions and millions of dollars off of us, the workers,” Reyes said. “And we aren't very safe.”

The restaurant frequently was busy and understaffed and the drivethrough was packed.

One day last June, the air conditioner was broken and temperatures soared to 109 degrees, according to a complaint Reyes and six other employees filed with California's Division of Occupational Safety.

“The manager told us that it wasn't hot, we were going through menopause,” Reyes said. “We had to bring fans from our homes to withstand the heat.”

Worker complaints

The workers went on strike for one day, prompting the manager to fix the air conditioning, Reyes said.

A few days later, on Aug. 3, the workers filed a wage theft complaint with the state labor commissioner, alleging owner Anil Yadav had been cheating workers out of pay and denying them breaks, including during 16-hour shifts.

Yadav did not return phone calls seeking comment. An attorney for Yadav, Kevin Kevorkian, declined to comment.

Workers went on strike again in April, after filing a second CalOSHA complaint citing moldy machines, a hole in the ceiling that let rain in and faulty drivethru speakers that they said led to a customer pulling a gun on a cashier.

That complaint also said workers, including a pregnant employee, had to climb onto a table to scoop ice for customers from a broken dispenser. Copies of both CalOSHA complaints and the wage theft complaint were provided to CalMatters by SEIU.

Fast food workers in California have gone on strike 2,560 times since the start of the pandemic, the SEIU said. The union also has helped workers file more than 330 health, workplace and wage complaints in California.

CalOSHA issued 38 COVID-related violations at fast food establishments, affecting a tiny fraction of the industry, the California Restaurant Association pointed out.

California has some of the nation's strictest worker protection laws, the association contends, so the state should instead fund its backlogged wage theft and workplace violation investigators.

Sectoral bargaining

Similar to the fast food push, nursing home workers, who also are supported by SEIU, have asked state lawmakers to create a board overseeing their industry.

This so-called “sectoral bargaining” approach is common in Europe, including Austria and France. It allows workers to bargain with employers across an industry rather than at each shop or business.

While some local and state governments in the U.S. have enacted industryspecific boards to dictate working conditions, SEIU's fast food council push is more ambitious, said David Madland, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

“You have the potential to transform the industry from a really low-wage sector — with little ability to change — to become a model for other sectors,” Madland said.

Even so, the idea isn't new for California. For most of the 20th century, the state issued industry-specific wage orders through the governor-appointed Industrial Welfare Commission to cover marginalized workers.

In sectors as wide-ranging as film, canning, and sheep-herding the commission set standards such as the lengths of breaks, the provision of uniforms and the temperature of workplaces. It even had the power to dictate the state minimum wage.

Today 17 industries still operate under its orders though the board itself is gone. It was defunded in 2004 at labor's urging after years of political controversy, including loosened regulations.